Vascular intervention may be implemented by, under a guidence of a digital subtraction angiography (DSA) system, manipulating a catheter inside human vessels with a surgeon and treating deseases to realize angiostegnosis dialation and angioplasty.
Conventionally, the vascular intervention is mainly done manually by the surgeons. Main disadvantages include 1) long time operation under the X-ray imaging will cause severe damage to the surgeons' health; 2) the conventional operation method requires high manipulation skills, long training time, and has high risk; and 3) factors, such as complicated operations, long operation time and fatigue of surgeons and unstable operation factors, will directly affect a quality of operation and latter patients' recovery. These shortcomings limit a further application of the vascular intervention. Therefore, it is needed a solution to adopt a robotic technology to the vacular intervention.
To solve above problems, Hansen Meidical improved a structure of catheter and then developed an active catheter system. However, a size of the developed catheter is too bigger and this narrows its application. Beihang University made an advancing catheter mechanism, but its assembly, disassembly and sterilization are inconvenient. Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an advancing catheter mechanism to imitate human's manipulation, but it cannot allow the catheter to advance continuously. In addition, it is unable to allow simultaneous advancement and rotation of a catheter/guide wire.